A key alleviation and cure of atherosclerosis is early detection and diagnosis so that the proper treatment can be initiated. Accurately identifying the presence, location, and size of an atherosclerotic plaque is thus diagnostically significant to establish a proper course of treatment, the need for surgical intervention, and the site of surgery or therapy. The ability to provide detailed images of such plaques is a key to providing such information.
MicroCT-based virtual histology imaging provides a high resolution system that can be simple to implement, relatively inexpensive, and more rapid than comparable methods of phenotyping anatomy, particularly anatomy of tissue samples, whole organs as well as whole organisms. One way to improve the level of detail that can be obtained from micro-CT virtual histology is through improvements in the way specimens are prepared and stained prior to being scanned.